The Enemies List

In June, eight of the Prairieland defendants were sentenced to a cumulative 450 years in prison. The sentences were largely for actions deemed ​“material support” for terrorism. Perhaps most egregiously, Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada, who was not present at the demonstration, was given 30 years for moving a box of anarchist zines, which was construed as conspiracy to corruptly conceal documents. 

The same month the protesters were sentenced, antifa was again invoked in the federal charges levied against 15 members of Direct Action Minnesota for their role in anti-ICE protests. Just as Prairieland prosecutors depicted black clothing at demonstrations as evidence of terroristic intent, the use of the messaging app Signal was understood as proof of conspiracy in the Minneapolis case. 

These cases demonstrate the grievous effects of applying the legal and ideological arsenal of counterterrorism to left-wing activism, imagined as a vast conspiratorial network (“Antifa”). They are also one front in something larger: a counterterrorism crusade that functions as a miniature version of the economic warfare that has been deployed against nation-states such as Cuba, Iraq and Iran. Its aim: to suffocate any opposition — abroad and at home. 

The Trump administration’s efforts to repress opposition have always been international in scope. While domestic terrorism is not covered as such by any existing law, designation as a foreign terrorist organization or specially designated terrorist group has momentous consequences — not least for U.S. citizens or residents accused of providing material support. The desire to paint antifa as an heir to the fantastical Soviet-managed ​“terror network” that preoccupied the CIA in the 1980s explains the decision to designate four marginal European groups as terrorists in November 2025. 

The economic siege against Cuba has also been accompanied by an effort to link the U.S. Left to nefarious foreign puppet masters. In an improbable regurgitation of high Cold War propaganda, contemporary Cuba has been reimagined as America’s dystopian nemesis. 

The State Department released a 100-page report, widely suspected to have been produced by the AI platform Claude, under the bombastic title ​“Cuba: The Capital of 21^st Century Communism.” The transparent aim is to tie the effort to turn Cuba into a docile dependent through economic (and eventually also military) warfare to the mounting campaign to persecute political dissidence at home.

Turning history on its head, the report’s first lines declare: ​“For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States.” The conspiratorial imagination is on overdrive: despite its poverty and almost total asymmetry of power vis-à-vis the United States, Cuba has orchestrated ​“a vast hemispheric network.” It has infiltrated ​“the highest reaches” of the United States and established ​“a revolutionary infrastructure designed to turn America against itself.” This infrastructure has co-opted everyone from Karen Bass to Barack Obama, the Black Panther Party to the People’s Forum, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! to myriad university departments and civil society organizations.

As scholar Charisse Burden-Stelly has argued, this pastiche of red scares past is a form of ​“anti-communist governance” — one that combines public authority and self-censorship ​“to penalize, regulate, censure and criminalize ideas and beliefs that challenge racial oppression, economic inequality and class antagonism by labeling them ​‘communist.’”

These increasingly delirious declarations are not trying to consolidate or manufacture consent; they seem meant for internal consumption within the echo chambers of the White House Situation Room and the MAGA mediasphere.

Unfortunately, without commensurate resistance, force without consent can go a long way. Behind the fantastical façade is the as yet unimpeded project — nationally and regionally — to maximize the impunity of capital while suppressing any alternative vision of collective life and welfare.

That international reach was on full display at the ​“Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism,” a conference hosted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington, D.C., in July. In his keynote remarks, Rubio lambasted a media and academic establishment that he presented as treating left-wing violence as a ​“protected class unto itself” and declared: ​“It is time to crush this evil forever.” He launched into a vituperative portrait of violent leftists as resentful enemies of Western greatness and civilization.

For Rubio, the menace to be snuffed out is ​“a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good … perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can.”

The sentiment was echoed with characteristic shrill hyperbole by White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, who asked the audience to reflect on why no one attending antifa protests looks ​“normal”. His answer contained a familiarly fascistic theory of leftist ideas manifesting as physical degeneracy: ​“Every one of them … has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways, to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.”

But behind the rhetoric about the revolt of the weak — which, like the anti-communist pastiche of the Cuba report, is of very old vintage — lies a focused, and terribly contemporary, strategy of repression. Miller emphasized the need to ​“disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute” the nodes of the new terror network.

This counterterrorism architecture projects any single act of so-called left-wing violence as linked to all others both ideologically and materially. Its latest target is the Italian anti-fascist hacktivist collective and digital service provider Autistici/​Inventati (translated as Autistic/​Invented), also known as A/I.

A/I was founded in 2001, in the context of the antiglobalization movement and the mobilization against the G-8 in Genoa, and provided services like blogs, mailing lists, email and website hosting to groups and individuals with whom it felt a broad political affinity.

On August 26, A/I was named a specially designated terrorist group by the State Department, alongside Palestine Action — the direct action group whose designation as a terrorist group by the UK government has been the object of sustained protest and challenge — and the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement (Masar Badil). But the designation does not concern any actions the collective has carried out. There are no indictments pending against it in either the United States or Italy. Rather, the State Department alleges that its digital infrastructure facilitated acts of ​“left-wing violence,” from railway sabotage in Europe to the resistance against Cop City in Atlanta, as well as communications among groups ranging from Rose City Antifa to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.

The designation’s effect, as intended, was swift and drastic. In Italy, where a U.S. designation has no legal standing, A/I was debanked by Banca Etica. The bank declared that notwithstanding its opposition to this campaign against its client, it could not risk the consequences to its other 130,000 accounts should the Treasury Department’s secondary sanctions affect the bank’s access to Visa, Mastercard, Nexi and dollar exchanges.

The outsize power of the U.S. government and the dollar in the international financial system, specifically in monetary transactions, means banks exercise anticipatory overcompliance to avoid risk. The effect is to turn any opponent into an economic nonperson, with all the social and political consequences that entails.

A/I disbanded to shield its former clients from persecution. Shortly before, the collective said the Trump administration had targeted it in a kind of ​“hybrid warfare.”

Perhaps the most worrying aspect is the absence of any concerted effort by Italian or European institutions to defend the collective’s right to free expression, which is also a right to the digital infrastructures that make it possible. As the collective Sabot Media observed, U.S. sanctions create a ​“perimeter of fear” around those they target, one that operates in advance of and in lieu of the law.

This crusade builds upon the anti-Palestinian, anti-migrant and anti-Muslim legal provisions that were crystallized by the so-called ​“war on terror” — when the terror lists were born.

As the academic Lisa Bhungalia rightly notes in her work on the ​“asphyxiatory violence” of contemporary imperialism, the current wave of repression is ​“a depository of past decades that build one upon the other rather than … a radical departure from that which came before.”

To face this moment, an internationalist Left must maintain and repair the infrastructures of resistance. The threat is not only a frontal assault or Trump and Miller’s fascist verbiage, but also the kind of suffocation that uses the silent violence of money and law to snuff out any liberatory alternative to the status quo.